


Obliviate

by LadySilver



Series: Weight of the World [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alcoholism, Angst, Angst Bingo, Gen, H/C bingo, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-24
Updated: 2012-09-24
Packaged: 2017-11-14 23:04:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySilver/pseuds/LadySilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adrian Harris has monsters. Laura Hale might be one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Obliviate

**Author's Note:**

> For H/C bingo prompt: _substance addiction_ and Angst bingo prompt: _insomnia_.
> 
> The story features alcohol abuse and contains references to canonical mass murder.

The shadows have claws and fangs, and they slink across the walls like thick smoke. 

Adrian knows that they’re stalking him, closing in around him, until that moment when they decide to pounce. He watches them at night, the lights he leaves on only barely able to hold the shadows at bay. He can’t sleep with the lights on, so he sits in his bed, alone in his house, and watches the shadows skulking in the corners. 

His fingers curl endlessly around the neck of a bottle, any bottle; he stopped being selective long before all the trouble began and he has no incentive to go back now. He drinks until he passes out, because the truth is that he can’t sleep with the lights out, either.

He can’t sleep because knows that monsters all come out at night, and he’s way overdue for a visit.

He can’t imagine what they’re waiting for. A part of him wishes that they would just get it over with. It’s been years since the fire, years that the monsters have made him wait. He knows they blame him, though certainly not more than he blames himself.

He tells anyone who knew him then that he’s stopped drinking, that the fire and sobriety are unrelated. Two lies are better than one. People almost always get so wrapped up in believing one that they fail to notice the weaknesses in the other. He can fake sober during the day. If his coffee is a little bit Irish, it’s merely to help him make it through.

The shakes only hit him when dusk falls and the shadows start to prowl. The other part of him—the part that doesn’t want to die—wishes the monsters would leave him alone, because the arson was his information, not his idea or doing, and he doesn’t deserve to dream of people screaming, of people being burned alive, of children dying. He hears their screams anyway, always on the edges of his thoughts. They get louder when he climbs into bed, and louder still as he stares at the wall across the room and the fine cracks in the eggshell paint as the stars spin across the sky.

He wants to fall asleep peacefully and wake up gently. 

Only, the very notion of sleep has come to seem more mythical than the beings whom he helped kill because one night at a bar—one night like every other night—he spoke to a pretty woman. He should have learned his lesson then.

Adrian lifts the bottle to his lips and tilts it back. The alcohol sloshes from the nearly empty bottle, a dribble spilling down his face and onto his shirt. He hears a tree branch scraping above his window and shudders, sucking in more of the alcohol to quiet his nerves. His skin is damp with a thin layer of sweat and his vision is blurry. He watches the corners, waiting for the claws to creep toward him. He knows this is the night, though he’s known that for six years and been wrong every time.

The doorbell rings.

He jumps. An arm flails out in reflex and knocks the clock next to his bed onto the floor with a loud crash. Staring at the shattered plastic for a long moment, he tries to figure out how it got on the floor and if he’s supposed to pick it up. He decides not to. If the clock is on the floor, he figures, it must have a reason. Besides, getting out of bed is dangerous. Hugging the bottle closer, he slides down under the covers as if he were a child and the thin cotton sheets were enough to protect him.

The doorbell rings again, a persistent noise booming through his house. A loud knocking follows.

“G’away,” he murmurs, his voice slurred. “Not home.”

There’s silence. 

He listens carefully for any hint of breathing or footsteps, any sign that the person or thing has let itself in. He hears a rattle like a door handle being tested, but no follow-up squeak of hinges or thunk of steps across the wooden floor. The branch continues to scrape. His pulse thumps loudly in his ears, irregular and rapid.

“’one’s home,” he repeats, his voice glancing off the inside of the bottle.

The doorbell starts to ring again, insistent, without pause. He can’t stand it. Adrian stumbles to his feet and down the hall, knowing that each step is a terrible idea and yet continuing because if he doesn’t, the tocsin won’t stop. There’s a small smoked glass window in the door. It shows him nothing. The last of the courage from the bottle bolsters him and he opens the door. His porch is dark, the light next to the door out. All he can see is shadows. He blinks, rubs his eyes, starts to shut the door. The shadow stops him, its eyes red and teeth glistening, strong claws clicking against the door that it easily pushes open against his efforts. It speaks.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to draw backward to safety and light and a time when no one cared what he had to say. His hand falls off the knob and he can feel a breeze from the door swinging open all the way, exposing the inside of his house like a turtle rolling on its back.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you, Mr. Harris. I’m sorry to have scared you,” the monster says, and Adrian wonders briefly at its ability to form sentences before deciding that he must be hallucinating. Nevertheless, the words sound sincere, and Adrian wants to believe them, but he knows better. He knows that his time is up and it’s here to make it happen. A shiver runs up his spine and lodges itself at the base of his head, every inch of his skin tightening into goosebumps.

“Leave me alone. I didn’t do anything,” he whispers, still backing away. The floor is uneven beneath his feet and the walls keep canting toward him and away. He’ll never be able to move fast enough to get away.

The monster’s only response is a low growl of disagreement, though later Adrian wonders if that’s what he heard or if that’s what he wanted to hear.

“I know what you are,” he blurts out, and it’s probably the worst thing he could say. Even in his current state, he knows better than to let the monsters know he can see them. His mouth tastes sour and dry. He needs a drink. His hands start to shake and he clenches them into fists that he presses hard against his thighs. The cloth of his slacks is limp from excess wearing and damp from the earlier spill. If he were sober, he’d be embarrassed. He’s not afraid, he tells himself, instead. I’m not afraid.

I’m not the one you need to be afraid of, the monster utters.

This time, he knows he heard language. He opens his eyes and blinks blearily at the figure before him. Though the bisecting line of his bifocals, he notes that the fur has receded, the maw has gone, and a person stands before him. A woman. Her hair is dark, like night. As her face comes into focus, he gasps. Her eyes are hazel and heavy with grief. He’d recognize them anywhere. God knows he saw them rolling in boredom often enough from the front seat of his classroom.

“Laura.”

She nods slightly in acknowledgement, then holds something out to him. It turns out to be the empty bottle. A large crack runs from its base. He must have dropped it, though he doesn’t remember when. “All I want is information,” she adds. She’s wearing jeans and a black windbreaker somehow, yet he could swear the monster had only fur. “I promise I’m not going to hurt you. Enough people have already been hurt.”

“I don’t know anything,” he says, the lie even more sour in his mouth than the aftereffects of his bender. He’s tried to convince himself of this for so long and has never been able to manage it for more than a few minutes at a time. This is not one of those times. “I didn’t do anything,” he repeats, always hoping that it’ll become true if he says it enough.

“That makes us even, then,” she replies. She doesn’t elaborate; he doesn’t need her to. He reaches reflexively for the bottle she’s holding as if it still contains anything worth drinking, as if he could make one more attempt to crawl into it for good. She stops him with a gentle hand and a shake of her head. Her skin is cool, fingernails filed into round tips, not at all like the claws that reach for him every night. “You don’t look so good,” she adds, and she pushes all the way into his house, closing the door behind her as if she had been invited. 

Adrian whips his head around, searching for another way out, unable to recall the layout of his own home. The hallway behind him is all darkness with strange, hulking shadows that have crawled from the nightmares he doesn’t have. The sudden movement and a new bout of terror brings on a wave of dizziness, and the ceiling begins to slope toward him and his stomach begins to fall out like he’s just topped the peak of a rollercoaster.

Laura catches him before he hits the floor and carries him to the couch. He thinks he should be embarrassed, but the thought can’t crawl far enough from the muddle in his head to get acted upon. “Sit here,” she says. “Let me get you something to drink.”

The quavering in his hands has started to spread to his legs and his body prickles like sparks are burning his skin. “Thank God,” he replies, slumping into the cushions. Except, the cold glass she pushes into his hands a few moments later turns out to be only water. He drinks it anyway, the ice banging against his lips and crunching between his teeth. The room is shrouded in darkness, the curtains fully drawn against any outside light. For the first time, he doesn’t find himself scrabbling for a light switch, doesn’t feel his heart racing.

“You know what happened,” she says. It’s not a question. She kneels in front of him, her long hair swinging in front of her face. The haunted look in her eyes bores into him and for once he’s glad for his inability to sleep, or he’d have to face that expression in his dreams for the rest of his life. “You know who destroyed my family.”

“I don’t know anything,” he says for the third time, then sighs. It’s still not true.

“Whoever set our house on fire? I think they’ve come back to finish the job,” Laura explains. She’s starting to sound frantic and nervous, as if she expects the shadows to leap off the walls and tear into her. How strange, Adrian thinks, that she’d be afraid of the things that stalk through the darkness when he’s not. How poorly that bodes for him and his survival instincts. “I need to know who they are.”

Adrian shakes his head, a poor decision if ever he’d made one. The ice water has settled hard between his eyes, and he pinches his nose trying to contain the ache. “Why come to me?”

“You talk too much when you’ve been drinking,” she answers. She frowns, her forehead and corners of her mouth drawing into creases well beyond her years, and tilts her head briefly as if listening to something.

The ambiguity in her answer confuses him. He starts to stand up. There’s a small bar on the far wall, an old buffet cabinet that he’d converted for more salient use. “I need a real drink,” he says. Some bourbon would be nice. He needs to clear his head, and water isn’t the answer.

Laura pushes him back down with barely a touch. You’ve had enough to drink, her gesture insists. He doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t fight her either. He thinks he can wait until she leaves.

“Please help me,” she begs. Her attention is fully on him again, yet her body is coiled as if preparing to bolt.

Adrian wraps his hands tighter around the glass. His eyes flick to where the bar is located, though he can’t see it without the light on, and he imagines the burn of whiskey in his mouth. One thought bleeds into another, and he thinks he smells smoke. Its odor is faint but distinct. He sees Laura in front of him, older than she should have been. The weight of tragedy is heavy on her shoulders. “There is one thing,” he tells her. “She had a necklace.” He reaches for the pad of paper that he keeps on the end table next to the phone. His hands are shaking and it's hard to hold the pen. He promises himself a liquid reward if they'll cooperate, and they steady long enough to sketch the engraving he saw.

Laura accepts the drawing and studies it, though how she can see anything he doesn’t know. Except, he does know. He does, and he’s going to do everything in his power to forget as soon as he can. “Thank you,” she says, standing up. She hesitates, the paper clenched in her fist. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything else?”

“She was pretty,” he adds. “She was so pretty that I didn’t see how ugly she really was.” He says it like an excuse, though it’s meant to be a statement of fact. Or maybe it’s the other way around. However Laura hears it, she only nods. 

She scribbles something on another piece of paper. “If you think of anything else, call me,” she insists, handing him the paper. He sees a square of white—all that his eyes can register—and assumes that what she wrote was a phone number. He nods and she thanks him again, then leaves.

As soon as she’s gone, he drops the paper to the table. Eager to discard the water glass, he sets it on the makeshift coaster, giving no thought to what effect that’ll have. Only one thing concerns him right now. He stands up and wobbles across the room. He walks straight into the buffet cabinet with enough force to make the decanters on it clatter and a bruise sprout on his hip, and pours himself one drink, then another. The rest of the bottle makes an uncertain trip back to the couch. He sinks back into the cushions and swallows back a gulp that makes lightning flicker behind his eyes.

With each flash, he turns over what Laura said, dissects how she looked and the way she acted. He hears screaming at the edge of his consciousness and sees again the depth of pain held in her eyes. She promised not to hurt him, but he knows how fragile that promise will be. She, too, has claws and fangs, and a darkness that is swallowing her whole. Soon enough, she’ll return. 

Adrian draws his knees up, pulling his ankles out of reach of whatever could swipe at him from under the furniture, and takes another drink. The tremors slowly ease and the tightness lessens. The alcohol helps, but it won't be enough. He won’t sleep tonight, because he can’t sleep when the shadows stretch, reaching for him, always smelling of smoke.


End file.
